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Rat Poison

David Bromwich, 17 October 1996

Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life 
byMartha Nussbaum.
Beacon, 143 pp., $20, February 1996, 0 8070 4108 4
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... These philosophers and novelists expand the limits of association a society takes for granted, and by doing so extend the possibilities of reform, and their commentator frankly declares herself their inheritor. Such is Nussbaum’s project, ‘the project’ as she has called it, for she recognises certain sharers of her aims: among literary critics, Wayne ...

No Shortage of Cousins

David Trotter: Bowenology, 12 August 2021

Selected Stories 
byElizabeth Bowen, edited byTessa Hadley.
Vintage, 320 pp., £14.99, April 2021, 978 1 78487 715 6
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The Hotel 
byElizabeth Bowen.
Anchor, 256 pp., $16, August 2020, 978 0 593 08065 8
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Friends and Relations 
byElizabeth Bowen.
Anchor, 224 pp., $16, August 2020, 978 0 593 08067 2
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... comparable writer. She liked to imagine the nuclear family as radically estranged from itself – by the death of a parent or a child, by childlessness, by emergency or neglect. Twenty-year-old Roderick Rodney in The Heat of the Day (1948) ‘would have esteemed, for instance, organic ...

Swing for the Fences

David Runciman: Mourinho’s Way, 30 June 2011

Scorecasting: The Hidden Influences behind How Sports Are Played and Games Are Won 
byTobias Moskowitz and Jon Wertheim.
Crown, 278 pp., £19.50, January 2011, 978 0 307 59179 1
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... José Mourinho. Before Real Madrid lost 1-0 at home to Sporting Gijón on 2 April, no team managed by Mourinho had lost a home league game for more than nine years, a sequence spanning four different clubs in four different countries (Mourinho has also managed Porto, Chelsea and Inter Milan) and lasting 150 matches. It is true that Porto, Chelsea, Inter and ...

The Person in the Phone Booth

David Trotter: Phone Booths, 28 January 2010

... as they open the door of a booth to make some life or death call is the stickiness left behind by a previous user. Expecting to speak and to listen, they instead inhale the anonymous yet fiercely intimate odour of the crowd. The protagonist of Howard Simpson’s Vietnam spy novel, Someone Else’s War (2003), has information to gather. He makes a ...

I Could Fix That

David Runciman: Clinton, 17 December 2009

The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History in the White House 
byTaylor Branch.
Simon and Schuster, 707 pp., £20, October 2009, 978 1 84737 140 9
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... notwithstanding the fact they spent most of his tenure in the White House trying to destroy him by fair means or foul, mainly foul. ‘Good ol’ Jesse,’ is all Clinton will say of the poisonous, racist Jesse Helms, who has just called him ‘unfit’ to lead the armed forces and warned him to stay away from North Carolina for his own safety. The ...

Had he not run

David Reynolds: America’s longest-serving president, 2 June 2005

Franklin Delano Roosevelt 
byRoy Jenkins.
Pan, 208 pp., £7.99, May 2005, 0 330 43206 0
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Franklin D. Roosevelt 
byPatrick Renshaw.
Longman, 223 pp., $16.95, December 2003, 0 582 43803 9
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Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom 
byConrad Black.
Weidenfeld, 1280 pp., £17.99, October 2004, 0 7538 1848 5
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... president. It’s important to spell out what his disability entailed. Roosevelt was stricken by polio in 1921 and never recovered the use of his legs. Every day he had to be dressed and undressed, helped onto the toilet and heaved into bed. ‘Rubberlegs’ – the nickname he was given ...

Betting big, winning small

David Runciman: Blair’s Gambles, 20 May 2004

... that an understanding was reached whereby Bush made it clear that he was going to disarm Saddam by force come what may, and Blair made it clear that, come what may, he would help him. If so, then there is also a strong suspicion that Blair, like Anthony Eden in late 1956, misled Parliament and the public over the nature of the undertaking on which he was ...

Bouncebackability

David Runciman: Athenian Democracy and Google, 29 January 2009

Democracy and Knowledge: Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens 
byJosiah Ober.
Princeton, 342 pp., £17.95, November 2008, 978 0 691 13347 8
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... you look for these books in bookshops (itself rather a quaint idea given that you’re supposed to be buying them online), you’ll discover them in the business or management sections, where their lessons about openness, flexibility, innovation and the importance of listening to what your customers are telling you have their most immediate applications. But ...

Like Boiling a Frog

David Runciman: The Future of Wikipedia, 28 May 2009

The Wikipedia Revolution 
byAndrew Lih.
Aurum, 252 pp., £14.99, March 2009, 978 1 84513 473 0
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... The best one-volume encyclopedia in the world used to be the Columbia Encyclopedia, first published by Columbia University Press in 1935. In our house we have the fifth edition, from 1993, and we still get it out occasionally to look up kings and queens and old-fashioned stuff like that ...

An Elite Worth Joining

David Trotter: Preston Sturges, 13 April 2023

Crooked, but Never Common: The Films of Preston Sturges 
byStuart Klawans.
Columbia, 366 pp., £22, January, 978 0 231 20729 4
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... exemption from everyday rough-and-tumble renders them particularly susceptible to humiliation by pratfall and in the sense that their vast wealth has by this account equipped them – contrary to popular prejudice – with an unquenchable desire to help out those less fortunate than themselves. Sturges certainly ...

After Foucault

David Hoy, 1 November 1984

Philosophy in France Today 
edited byAlan Montefiore.
Cambridge, 201 pp., £20, January 1983, 0 521 22838 7
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French Literary Theory Today: A Reader 
edited byTzvetan Todorov, translated byR. Carter.
Cambridge, 239 pp., £19.50, October 1982, 0 521 23036 5
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Histoire de la Sexualité. Vol. II: L’Usage des Plaisirs 
byMichel Foucault.
Gallimard, 285 pp., £8.25, June 1984, 2 07 070056 9
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Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics 
byHubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow.
Chicago, 256 pp., $8.95, December 1983, 0 226 16312 1
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The Foucault Reader 
edited byPaul Rabinow.
Pantheon, 350 pp., $19.95, January 1985, 0 394 52904 9
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Michel Foucault and the Subversion of Intellect 
byKarlis Racevskis.
Cornell, 172 pp., £16.50, July 1983, 0 8014 1572 1
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Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Western Culture: Toward a New Science of History 
byPamela Major-Poetzl.
Harvester, 281 pp., £22.50, May 1983, 0 7108 0484 9
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Michel Foucault: Social Theory as Transgression 
byCharles Lemert and Garth Gillan.
Columbia, 169 pp., £8.50, January 1984, 0 231 05190 5
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Foucault, Marxism and Critique 
byBarry Smart.
Routledge, 144 pp., £5.95, September 1983, 0 7100 9533 3
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... his conception of philosophy and too soon to see clearly what the influence of his thought would be. Just as French philosophy was once divided between Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, it recently seemed to be going in two different directions, one exemplified by Foucault and the other ...

Montgomeries

David Fraser, 22 December 1983

Monty. Vol. II: Master of the Battlefield 1942-1944 
byNigel Hamilton.
Hamish Hamilton, 863 pp., £12.95, October 1983, 0 241 11104 8
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Decision in Normandy: The Unwritten Story of Montgomery and the Allied Campaign 
byCarlo D’Este.
Collins, 555 pp., £12.95, October 1983, 0 00 217056 6
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... those who judge him a competent if somewhat pedestrian professional soldier who usually managed by good fortune to decline battle unless the odds were overwhelmingly in his favour, a general apt to forfeit the fruits of victory by excessive caution; an unimaginative commander with a very inflated view of his own talents ...

A Tide of Horseshit

David Runciman: Climate Change Impasse, 24 September 2015

Why Are We Waiting? The Logic, Urgency and Promise of Tackling Climate Change 
byNicholas Stern.
MIT, 406 pp., £19.95, May 2015, 978 0 262 02918 6
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Natural Capital: Valuing the Planet 
byDieter Helm.
Yale, 278 pp., £20, May 2015, 978 0 300 21098 9
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Climate Shock: The Economic Consequences of a Hotter Planet 
byGernot Wagner and Martin Weitzman.
Princeton, 250 pp., £19.95, February 2015, 978 0 691 15947 8
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... as winners. These analogies are intended to capture the scale of the challenge – it’s going to be a major effort – while keeping alive the thought that we can succeed. The problem is that climate change is nothing like anything we’ve encountered before. Just because we did all those things doesn’t mean we can do this one. So what about a different ...

Destiny v. Democracy

David Runciman: The New Deal, 25 April 2013

Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time 
byIra Katznelson.
Norton, 706 pp., £22, April 2013, 978 0 87140 450 3
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... the 1938 congressional midterms was barely 35,000. This remarkably limited franchise was achieved by means of elaborate rules – including a poll tax – designed to make voting both difficult and expensive; it was backed up by threats of violence to anyone who challenged the status quo. The aim, of course, was to make ...

It’s Been a Lot of Fun

David Runciman: Hitchens’s Hitchens, 24 June 2010

Hitch-22: A Memoir 
byChristopher Hitchens.
Atlantic, 435 pp., £20, June 2010, 978 1 84354 921 5
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... If he is going to take up roasting legs of lamb at this stage of his life, then what else might be possible?’ Christopher, it seems, no longer makes Peter angry. He just makes him a little sad. What he is sad about is Christopher’s inability to see that his militant atheism is just an extension of his earlier Trotskyism. Christopher, Peter thinks, is ...

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